"I fear we’re heading towards civil war": A chat with one of the Yale professors who left for Canada

“The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later.”

Prof. Marci Shore; image by Oleksandr Popenko

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Although the fear of U.S. fascism under Donald Trump isn’t new, for years the alarm bells were just scattered tinkles, coming from people who Trump called “the enemies from within.” These “radical left” enemies included politicians, journalists, professors, and everyday people who were simply paying attention to his authoritarian words and actions.

But seemingly overnight — with DOGE’s war on institutions, the escalation of ICE raids, the illegal deportation of innocent people to El Salvador, the refusal to obey court orders, lawsuits that target news organizations and threaten to pull broadcast licenses, and the extortion of law firms — an awareness has smashed into the U.S. mainstream, triggering alarm bells that crescendoed into a full-blast siren on June 14, No King’s Day, the largest protest in U.S. history.

And perhaps one of the catalysts for this anti-authoritarian protest came in the shape of a terrifying New York Times print and video essay on May 14, called “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S,” which immediately went viral. (See video below.)

In the piece, three Yale history professors — Marci Shore, her husband Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, who are all widely known for their books on authoritarianism — talk about how they fled the United States for Canada, and are all now teaching at the University of Toronto.

One of the most chilling lines in the Times video, one that stuck to my gut, came from Prof. Shore, who said, “The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later.” As a paranoid person myself who is always wondering what this aforementioned “sooner” looks like, I had the urge to contact her and ask what she meant by that.